Between the Lines of Humanity
by scorchedtrees
Summary: AU: He is her team leader, her mentor, her teacher, her superior and her elder and an assassin, but he is also just a man. Written for Rivetra Week.


_A/N: Written for Rivetra Week Day 5: AU. I didn't have time to write my original idea for the AU prompt so I wrote this instead (after starting and scrapping four other things each nearly 2k words lol I should've just written the original thing)._

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He's the first one she sees when she walks through the front doors of the guildhouse, standing beside Lord Erwin with one hand in his pocket and the other twirling a blade between his fingers. He isn't tall, not like the others around him, but his eyes are cold, his face blank, and he looks just like the inevitable death she is meant to become.

"Hanji. Mike. Levi," Erwin tells her, and she nods at all three of them. He's the only one who doesn't nod back.

He's also the one who teaches her how to hold a knife properly and where to stab it for quick, clean kills.

"Only if you can't slit the throat," he says, and she holds her breath when he speaks next to her ear because he smells like cigarette smoke and lye soap, scents that don't quite cover up the stink of death. "If they're one of those bloody castle guards, knock 'em down first—that armor's tough to move in. Open the helmet and put a dagger through both eyes."

She listens carefully and copies his movements, and out of everyone who listens to his demonstrations, she's the only one he tells to stay back, and he surprises her by suddenly swinging a fist at her when they are alone.

Weeks of lessons keep her quick and she dodges the blow just in time. She lasts for nearly a minute before he kicks her feet out from under her and pins her to the ground, his body heavy on hers, sharp cold steel at her throat.

"You're dead," he says, and then he strolls out of the room, leaving her to fume and practice what he taught until the sun is halfway up the sky.

He takes a special interest in her for reasons she can't say, but she won't complain, not if it means she will improve faster. He watches her slash at invisible opponents and corrects her stance and shows her how to step silently, how to melt into the shadows and blend in with crowds and disappear the moment her task has been completed.

The first time she is sent on a mission he goes with her, and she doesn't stop to wonder at the situation, a Legion veteran accompanying a new recruit on a simple assassination job. He watches from the roof opposite as she scales the house and picks the lock on the window, and she thinks she's doing pretty well right until the moment she stares down at the sleeping man's peaceful face and something clenches in her chest.

But Levi is waiting outside, and she screws her eyes shut and gets the job done. He offers her a clean handkerchief to wipe her blade, and it isn't until they are back at the guildhouse that he claps a hand on her shoulder. The touch startles her out of her brooding thoughts.

"It gets easier," he says, and only then does she realize her hands are still shaking.

With every job completed successfully, her heart hardens a bit further and Levi does not give her handkerchiefs anymore; she brings her own. With every job completed successfully, he looks at her with a strange mixture of shame and pride in his eyes and she wonders why his gaze should cause something in her chest to twist so; with every job completed successfully, the higher-ups make a tally, and half a year with perpetually bloody hands later, they send her and three others to find Levi.

"A _team_," he spits when they ask. "The guild's already got a fucking dozen teams for big jobs. I work solo."

But apparently Erwin Smith himself ordered it and one does not argue with Erwin Smith, not even Levi. The next day Petra says good-bye to her roommates and moves two levels up to sleep on the same floor as the rest of her new team.

It's hard to trust people in the Legion, but Auruo, Gunter, and Erd quickly become as reliable to her as her own two hands: under Levi's watchful eye, they become an inseparable unit that functions like the cogs of a well-oiled machine. Auruo is excellent at scouting locations, Gunter always mans the ropes and lets them swing first, Erd is like a walking armory considering all the steel he can hide on his body, and Petra… with the right amount of charm and grace, no one expects a lady or serving girl to kill.

Levi leads them on most of their missions, though sometimes they go in pairs. One time she is alone with him and when she tells him to stay back so she can drop into the guard tower herself, he surprises her by shaking his head and following her in to watch her work. Something about the moon shining through the single window in the tower, illuminating the white faces and red stains on the corpses, makes her eyes water and she's not sure who is more startled when he walks over to wipe a tear from her bloodstreaked face.

Quickly their team becomes notorious for its high success rate, and they break into palaces and prisons alike with no trace left behind except a few slashed throats. People whisper about them all over the kingdoms, and whether she is deep in the South with desert shamen or high up North among the mountain rangers, she can hear talk of the Legion's ever-growing influence.

A few comfortable years pass, years of training during the day and sneaking into places at night, playing cards with her team in the evening and sleeping together in a huddle on the floor when they travel. No building is too heavily guarded for them, no city too dangerous, no lock too tough, and looking back, these are the years Petra cherishes the most. She should have known things would not stay the same forever, but she still wants to pretend they will. Murmurings of a rival guild—new and fresh but twice as deadly—begin to spread across Sina, but she doesn't want to believe them.

"Who'd be stupid enough to fight the Legion in their home turf?" she asks Levi one night as they lean out the open window of her room; she watches him breathe smoke into the filthy air and she decides she likes the smell. The open window would be a bad idea and a potential target for other assassins were it not facing an empty courtyard, one that belongs to Lord Erwin Smith, a marquis in the Sina king's royal court. There are certain benefits to having a nobleman as a guild leader.

"Heard they call themselves the Titans. Shit name." Levi takes a puff, then offers her the cigarette.

He rolled it himself, which is what prompts her to accept the proffered tube. She sucks in a lungful of smoke and coughs. He smirks a little.

To prove her point, she takes another few puffs before handing it back to him. Their fingers brush and oddly enough, she finds his touch warm and clean and she imagines those fingers against her face, not the unforgiving steel of a blade.

No one really takes the Titans seriously until the turf wars begin with what quickly becomes known as the Colossal Riot: hundreds of people storm different locations throughout the city all at once—the last few piers at the harbor by the warehouses, inconspicuous residential areas in the merchants' sector, even the rat-infested streets of the lower quarter. Only the king's soldiers prevent them from entering the district of the nobility, but hundreds of soldiers and civilians alike die that day in what goes down in history as one of the city's bloodiest dates.

Levi is called to a meeting, and when he comes back the news he shares is grim. "Titans," he says. "They were targeting places with the most Legion influence. This is going to be war."

And war it is: they can no longer pass in the streets without fearing for their lives, and more often than not she and the team fight their way back from a simple trip to the marketplace. The dead bodies pile up in a way they're not supposed to: the Legion is a group of assassins, killing occasionally in the dark, not murderers who butcher people for the sake of power.

"This is ridiculous," she breathes as she and Levi press together in a corner of one dark alleyway, waiting for Titan assassins to pass. "We're supposed to be the killers. Why are they targeting us?"

"I don't know," he says, his breath warm and words cold on her cheek. "Perhaps this is our retribution."

Jobs slow down until one day, Levi calls them all in. Petra's never seen him look so serious, never seen his face so openly tired, and she worries for not just his health and safety but all of theirs. She and Auruo sit down; Gunter and Erd remain standing. Levi waits until all their eyes are fixed on him before he speaks.

"We haven't done anything hard in a while, huh?" he says. "You up for something?"

They all call out their agreement, because that's what they're supposed to do, but Petra feels a stone lodged in the pit of her stomach.

The plan is simple: Erwin is 99% positive where the Titans are keeping their current headquarters. Sneak in, assassinate the leaders, sneak out.

"It's a suicide mission," Petra says later that night. She is in Levi's room, standing by his desk with her arms crossed and watching him practice his letters with careful strokes of his pen. He can twitch his wrist twelve different ways to kill people with a single movement, but he needs to practice his letters, and the thought is somewhat comforting. "Wouldn't it be better to lure them out?"

"You weren't at the meeting," Levi says. "They've tried."

"Let us try. We're good. But if they send us in there like that… we're all going to die. And the Legion will have lost good fighters when it needs them the most."

He sets his pen down, pushes his paper away, and looks up at her. "Petra," he says, and the sound of her name on his lips freezes something in her. He rarely calls them by name. "Erwin made a decision. We'll carry it out."

There is something exhausted in his tone, something sick and tired of obeying, of fighting, of everything, and in that moment she wants to let her mask crack, let herself scream and cry and rage, because she's hardly twenty years of age and already she can see her life coming to an end.

But she won't, she won't lose control, not in front of Levi, and in the end she cannot help saying, "I spent my youth killing. I haven't done anything else with my life."

"You survived," he says. "That's more than enough."

She chokes back a laugh. "At the price of my humanity, right? I haven't done anything other women do. What do women do anyway? They find husbands and have children. I don't want to do that, but I've never…" She trails off.

"Been with a man?" he finishes his sentence for her.

He's seen her at her worst, drenched in blood and screaming, bones broken and heart splintered, and he has always helped her put herself back together. He knows her inside and out, and his words should not cause her to flush so, but she does anyway.

"Have you?" she blurts.

"Been with a man?" His lips twitch. "No."

A smile springs unbidden to her face; funny how she is facing almost certain death tomorrow, yet he never fails to lighten her spirits, take her mind off whatever is bothering her, even if it is sometimes by unpleasant means. "That's funny," she teases, "'cause I've seen the way you talk to Lord Erwin."

And then he stands, and she gulps, because he is closer than she expected, his eyes at her level, strands of his hair in her face, his mouth hovering over hers as he says, "And do I do_ this_ to Lord Erwin?"

His breath fans across her cheek at his words, and she smells cigarette smoke and lye soap and _him_. His thumbs reach up to brush her jaw, his fingers resting lightly on the sides of her face, and she closes her eyes and parts her lips when he leans in.

It feels nice, she decides, his mouth on hers, it feels right. Something sparks within her at his touch, something that makes her blood heat up the way killing never does. She drags her fingers through his hair and sighs when he at last pulls away to look her in the eye.

"No," she whispers, "you don't." And she tugs him back down to her.

When he finally leans back and says he needs to shower and sleep so he can begin preparations tomorrow, she rubs her swollen lips, smoothes out her mussed hair, and heads for the door. A faint touch on her shoulder stops her, and when she turns back, he looks every bit as uncertain as she did the first time she stepped into the Legion's main guildhouse, still a girl with no life to leave and no real life ahead of her.

"Stay," he says, and it sounds like a question.

She nods.

When he is gone, she sits at his desk because she is too shy to sit on his bed, and looks around. She studies his careful, spidery script, the different knives he has placed on every corner, the various coins from different kingdoms stacked in small piles by his jar of pens. She looks at all the belongings on Levi's desk, and she thinks: he is her team leader, her mentor, her teacher, her superior and her elder and an assassin, but he is also just a man, a man who cares for those who work beneath him and brings them oranges in the infirmary when they are sick and shows them how to clean their wounds before they get infected; a man who sleeps too little and worries too much and is far too gentle with his hands when he wants to be; a man who is her friend.

She thinks of all the things she's never done, the childhood she never had, the lives she never had a chance to properly mourn, and her throat tightens. She thinks of the swift sureness of her blade, the blood she will never completely wash off her hands, the mission she will probably not return from. She thinks of her teammates, following their leader straight into death without hesitation, thinks of Levi with his guarded eyes and constant frown and cold voice, thinks of his fingers buried in her hair and his lips soft against hers and the broken way he says her name, and she closes her eyes.

And she decides tomorrow she will be an assassin, possibly for the last time, but tonight she just wants to be human.


End file.
